Top State Official Urges Santa Ana to Seek More Low-Cost Housing : Overcrowding: City’s occupancy restrictions aren’t the solution to the problem, he says during visit.
The state’s top housing official, an opponent of Santa Ana’s forceful crackdown on residential overcrowding, said Friday that city leaders should seek more low-cost living units rather than only restricting the number of tenants who can occupy existing residences.
“I’m not unsympathetic to concerns about overcrowding,” said Timothy L. Coyle, director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development. “Over the last 10 years, overcrowding doubled, not just in Santa Ana, but all over the state.”
But just before touring Santa Ana’s overcrowded neighborhoods with officials, including Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove) and Santa Ana Councilman Robert L. Richardson, Coyle said: “What we would like to see is the city aggressively pursue an increased supply of housing. I’m optimistic. This is intended to be a positive, constructive visit today.”
Coyle went to the home of Ascencion Briseno, a Santa Ana resident who has successfully battled the city’s attempts to adopt an ordinance restricting the number of people living under one roof. That ordinance would force him and his family from their home if approved.
The state housing department sided with Briseno in a lawsuit against the city, and a state appeals court recently rejected the proposed occupancy limitation law. City officials, however, are considering an appeal to the state Supreme Court.
“I wanted to see firsthand not only the physical configuration (of the apartment), but the human beings who would be displaced,” Coyle said. “I just saw a nice house that appears to be comfortable.”
Under Santa Ana’s proposed ordinance, each housing unit with two occupants must have at least 150 square feet of living space, and another 100 square feet for each additional resident. “Living space” excludes stairwells, halls, closets, bathrooms and kitchens.
However, that contradicts state housing regulations, which permit up to 10 residents in an “average” one-bedroom apartment. And state rules contain no square-footage standard.
During his 90-minute tour with city officials, Coyle was urged to relax his department’s opposition to housing occupancy restrictions. He inspected an overcrowded apartment complex, as well as deteriorated multifamily homes in several neighborhoods citywide. However, he was reluctant to single out overcrowding as the main reason for their dilapidated conditions.
“The examples of housing that we saw in serious disrepair can be attributed to a number of things,” Coyle said, “but I think the primary reason for the things I saw was simply bad management.”
Richardson, one of the city’s most stringent supporters of occupancy restrictions, agreed that poor management was responsible for some deterioration. However, Richardson added: “To say, ‘Let’s get rid of the bad managers,’ all right, let’s do that. But there’s no escaping that overcrowding is the major cause of property deterioration in Santa Ana.”
Richardson called the meeting with Coyle helpful, and said that both the city and the state had agreed to work together to solve overcrowding problems. Still, he added that state officials need to be more realistic in their approach to cities’ problems.
“Simply put, just building more housing isn’t the answer for us, because we don’t have room for more housing and schools,” Richardson said. Also, he said, no city appears willing to build additional housing unless the state permits stricter occupancy regulation to avert its deterioration.
Briseno, who lives with his wife and three children in a clean one-bedroom apartment on Minnie Street, was at work Friday morning when Coyle dropped by, accompanied by Santa Ana lawyer Richard L. Spix, who represented the furniture company worker in his suit against the city.
But Briseno’s wife, Beatrice, 47, said through an interpreter that if the city succeeded in getting its overcrowding ordinance approved, “We would have no place to go.” She also called the proposed ordinance “unjust,” and added: “We can’t just go out and rent or buy a (larger) house. It’s just not feasible.”
Coyle reaffirmed the state’s opposition to cities creating occupancy ordinances such as the one Santa Ana has been trying to adopt. “The outcome of this--perhaps well-intended--ordinance is displacement of families. The outcome would have been tragic.”
Coyle’s desire that cities build and preserve existing affordable housing was echoed later at a separate meeting of homeless advocacy groups sponsored by the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force. Community leaders there said that minimum wage-earners--those making $680 a month--simply cannot afford Orange County’s average rent of about $700 a month. With more affordable housing, they said, the incentive to cram into small living quarters evaporates.
